Holidays part 4 - Glaciers

Continued from parts 1, 2 and 3.

The next day we continued on up the valley.  I was planning that this be the last holiday post, but as the journey was almost as spectacular as the destinations (and the glacier stuff was just so cool!), I decided this part deserved an extended post of its own.

This is a road which will never be finished.  Up and down the valley is evidence
of great forces at work, the annual cycles of freeze/melt/erode dwarfed by the
effects of 2005's earthquake and 2010's floods.  In this stretch 1/4 of a mile of
road  was under scree (left side of pic), and rather than dig it out, it was simpler to
build two bridges and drive along the opposite bank.  For some idea of scale,
compare the size of the boulder on the left bank with the truck on the right.

A quick leg-stretch and photo stop.

The guidebook advises tourists that the stretch of road up to Naran is "blocked by
4 or 5 small glaciers in the early season".  This problem is solved by digging a
trench like this.  One or two of them also have a small river flowing under the
glacier and across the road, before plunging into a gaping hole under the ice on
the other side. The word on the street was that the road would be open imminently.

Our first glimpse of Naran.  At this point, halfway through a glacier, there was an
impromptu car park with a selection of jeeps awaiting the clearing of the next bit.

Another jeep-load of optimistic travellers joins the party.

I used to have a Playmobil one of these when I was smaller.

Just beyond the bulldozer is a 20ft+ cliff of snow, below which
another digger removes the snow it pushes over the edge.

It was looking like another day or two's work, so we hike
the last half mile or so into Naran.

After yesterday's exertions, today we content ourselves with a very gentle
stroll up to a viewpoint,  before sampling Naran's entertainment options...

...which, seeing as the road isn't open yet, consist of one hotel (which is opened, and a couple of rooms hastily vacuumed, at the request of our guide, Bashir) and one small kitchen which appears to be serving the entire population of the town (all of whom Bashir knows personally).  The food is simple, but pretty good, and over our three days we have every dish on the menu - chicken karahi, channa dal (like chickpeas), subzee (potato/peas/chilli) - most of them twice.

As the road gradually gets closer to openness over the next couple of days, the town ever-so-slowly starts to transform:  a few more tourists trickle in (some have driven all the way from Karachi!), doubling the population; one or two little shops are persuaded by Bashir to open their shelves to customers on an ad hoc basis; several of the broken down wooden buildings have walls repaired and new roofs erected.  In one way at least, this is a great time to be here - it must be heaving in summer when all the 100+ hotels are filled.

More expeditions to follow in the final post soon.

Holidays part 3 - Shogran

First things first - yes, we're fine, despite our close proximity to recent news headlines. Things have seemed pretty quiet so far, but we'll most likely be staying in for the next few days at least until we have more of an idea of the public mood.

Continued from part 1 & part 2.

So, on to the more spectacular stuff! After our disappointment at not making to Hunza, our Plan B was to hire a guide with a jeep who would take us up the Kaghan valley for a few days.

Looking down on Mansehra from the bypass.

View from the balcony of our hotel room at Shogran.

After checking into our hotel, our guide took us on an expedition in the afternoon,
starting with a jeep ride as far as the jeep could get - the bit I'm  standing on is a
steep hairpin bend covered in a couple of feet of snow.

Traversing a snow bank.  There's a jeep track somewhere under this lot.

Sam spent a fair amount of the trip not looking down.

Sri, where nomadic shepherds bring their flocks in the summertime.
(click to view large version, then cross your eyes and match up the pictures to see
in 3D - easier than magic eye anyway!)

The less tired explorers charge on to the next summit, leaving the others to amble
down at a gentler pace.

Paya* - at just about bang on 3000m we're merely 2.23x higher than the UK.
(*or Paye, or Pae - in this country spelling of words using the Latin alphabet
is largely up to the speller, as long as it roughly looks how it sounds!)

180° or so from Paya - click for full size.  The pointy one on the sawtooth ridge
about 2/3 of the way across the image is Malika Parbat (Queen of the Mountains),
the highest in the valley at 5290m - though that's small fry for this country...

Starting the descent.  Deep snow if good fun for this part.
Lower down there was a bit of a short cut - see video below:

A quality piece of road-building.

For those not determinedly not looking down, here's the view
out the side of the jeep.  You can see a long way down, at
angles of 60-80° below the horizontal.

Looking down the Kaghan valley from above Kiwai, where the road to
Shogran joins the main road to Naran and beyond.

Malika Parbat in the sunset.  More to come soon...

Holidays part 2 - Islamabad

Continued from part 1.

One more Daewoo Express ride took us back up to Islamabad, where we intended to spend one night before getting the plane to Gilgit.  However, our plans didn't quite turn out as we'd hoped.  You see, the flight to Gilgit (further north) is in a small plane which flies up a valley between big mountains (rather than over the top) so it only flies in clear weather.  So even though they let you book seats months in advance, this is no guarantee of being able to get on the flight.  The weather was good on the day we wanted to fly so the flight went, but it hadn't gone on several of the preceding days, meaning there was now a long waiting list of people trying to get on the flight.

When we arrived at our guest house we met another family who live and work up that way who had already been waiting for several days, so our hopes were not high.  The airline never let slip where you might be on the waiting list*, so you are faced with the delightful prospect of an interminable wait in Islamabad punctuated by fruitless calls to the PIA call centre in Karachi.

*my conspiracy theory says that this must be deliberate, otherwise they couldn't operate their complicated system of priority lists, VIP seats and backhanded deals through "my brother has a friend behind the PIA desk - I'll see what I can do".  According to this family we met, you used to not be able to book tickets ahead, and you just turned up - and it mostly worked, you got your flight usually within a few days.  Now, since the advance booking system started (and given that one can easily get a full refund if you don't fly, so people often speculatively book lots of seats in case they need them, thus throwing even more disarray into the system), people have been known to go to the airport 15 days on the trot, and still not get on board.  Trying to be organised doesn't suit this country.

We decided to give it one more day, which meant we had an afternoon to look around Islamabad, courtesy of lots of tiny yellow taxis.

Taxi races - what's that, a seat belt?!

We took a nice little walk up to Daman-e-Koh, a viewpoint up on the Margalla hills overlooking Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

A steep climb to Daman-e-Koh.

Interesting little flowers.  Also on the wildlife front we saw a large mongoose,
some wild boar and a couple of jackals in the woods.

Busking Pakistani-style.

Looking down on Islamabad.

Faisal Mosque.

Botanical inspections.

Back to our travel plans:  we took one speculative trip to the airport at 6am the next day to see if we might get some no-show seats, but after failing to get on 3 flights to Gilgit and one to Skardu (which would have involved an additional 6 hour jeep ride to Gilgit), we decided to cut our losses - especially given that my parents had to be back in Islamabad in a week's time to catch their onward flight, and there would be no guarantee of getting back again even if we did make it there in the first place - and move to a hastily concocted Plan B.  Which involved hair-raising jeep rides, glaciers and sliding down mountains, and of which there will be more another day...

Holidays part 1 - Lahore

For the last couple of weeks we've been enjoying some time off. Jo's parents came out to visit, and we took the opportunity to see a few more bits of the country. After a couple of days of letting them recuperate from the journey and showing them the compound and our workplaces, we took a quick trip down to Lahore.  We'd been before (Jenny twice, Jo three times), but for conferences and business trips, leaving little chance for sight-seeing - time to remedy that then:

We took a trip into old Lahore to have a look at the Badshahi Musjid and Lahore Fort.  Normally you can go inside these, but unfortunately there turned out to be a Sikh festival involving many large beards going on in their adjacent building, preventing visitors from entering the area.  As we were wandering around deciding what to do next we were hailed by a lady coming down the street with "Hello, do you speak English?".  She was a British Pakistani over visiting, and her relatives/friends kindly invited us up onto the roof of their nearby restaurant for a better view of things.

The Badshahi Musjid (Mosque) in old Lahore.  (click for full size)

Cooco's Den, reserved for dinner later.

Next on our haphazard agenda was a hunt for "that street where they make the musical instruments" in the Langay Bazaar. It turned out that the Langay Bazaar actually covers a rather huge area, so it took us a rather long time, and many helpful directions* to find it.  On our quest we traversed many little alleys lined with a fascinating array of shops and stalls, the most striking being a whole section seemingly dedicated to cooking pans (it's hard to see how they make a living - I mean, how many times in your life do you need to buy a dozen-piece stack of shiny metal pans, ranging in largeness from small family to medium-sized community), and another to shoes (and shoe components - crates of rubber soles and rolls of leather, real and imitation).

*People are generally quite helpful, in attitude if not in the actual help part. If you don't know where something is, you should always make a random suggestion rather than lose face by admitting that you don't know!

After a while a little old man showed us the way, and we wandered into a few shops, with the idea of seeing about a musical souvenir of some sort.  In the second shop I tried out a baja (harmonium) or two - of the simpler ones (i.e. cheaper, not double-sounding, no drone stops, no octave-altering mechanisms) they didn't have the colour I liked, but they did have one that wasn't quite finished yet.  They said they could finish it for me in half an hour.

This being Pakistan, we went off to find some lunch, and came back an hour later to find a guy finishing the tuning of the reeds**, only slightly hampered by the virtuoso performance of the little old teacher they'd brought in to demonstrate how it should be done.  We bargained the shopkeeper down a little, but the readiness with which he accepted our price suggested we perhaps could have aimed a little lower.  Never mind.

**a process which involves physically removing little bits of metal from the reeds with a file.  For each note the top is flipped open to reach the reeds to be filed a little bit, then swiftly flipped closed again to seal the airbox so that the note can be sounded.  Repeat until acceptably in tune.

Baja.  Not Badger.

My parents were introduced to many exciting forms of transport. Five people plus two rucksacks and a baja were a bit of a squeeze in this rickshaw!

Hold on tight!

Next, a quick jaunt out to the Wagah (or Wagha, or Wahga, depending on which road sign you read) Border to watch the famous daily closing ceremony (which I have described previously here).

Chacha (uncle) Pakistan faces off towards the Indians.

Revelry in the crowds.

Menacing guards.

Stomp stomp.

They definitely pick the hugest guys for this job.  And/or with the largest lung
capacity.

Lastly, back to the old town for dinner on the roof terrace of Cooco's Den, overlooking the mosque and fort.  Part 2 tomorrow.

Nice headgear at Cooco's.

Badshahi by night.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention one of my favourite moments: as we were waiting at the traffic lights in our taxi, on the other side of the junction, executing a u-turn through the flow of traffic coming from both sides was a car balanced precariously on the top of a small forklift.

We watched in mild incredulity as the car made its stately sideways progress in the opposite direction to the flow of motorbikes and rickshaws diving around and under it. Wonderful.

SWH project part 11 - panel beating

Or perhaps more accurately, squeezing, sticking and nut-and-bolting.

A quick catch-up to where we are now - tried to post this 2 weeks ago, but a combination of temperamental internet and holidays prevented that.  So...

Frames are up.

Our sheets of aluminium had grooves pressed into them by a guy with a
hydraulic press.  This should enable the fins to be made in one shiny piece...

...or at least it would have, had the guys at the metalwork
yard, on finding that they didn't have a die the right size,
not gone ahead and done it anyway with the smallest one
they had...

...meaning that we had to improvise a method of squeezing the fins so that
they fit tightly around the copper tubes for good thermal transfer...

...which in turn meant slicing up our nice big shiny multiple-grooved sheets
(or at least paying a guy in the bazaar with some big scissors to do it for us)...

...and slicing up our left-over sheets to fill in the gaps...

...thus giving us double the number of nuts and bolts to do
up.  Sigh.  And just to further illustrate the way things work(!)
here, we were well into our third panel (with around 286 nuts/
bolts per panel) before my boss casually mentioned "I've got
an electric screwdriver here - do you want to use it?

Panel 1 of 10.  Two of us managed six between us before
we went on holiday, by which time the guy I was working
with had learned enough to carry on and finish them by the
time we arrived back yesterday.  Twice the amount of work,
and not as aesthetically pleasing, but after 2 or 3 thousand
nuts, bolts and washers and a dozen or so tubes of silicone:
Job Done.

Mathematical plants

We've got a nice variety of shapes and patterns out in the
hospital grounds at the moment.

These ones have multiple blooms on a single stalk, arranged in a staggered
manner offset one above the other like parts of a wedding-cake on a stand.

I have no idea why this one gazania (out of dozens like it) had its petals
folded up like this, but looks pretty cool.  (click to see full size)

Fairly special even when closed up for the night.

Less beautiful perhaps, but nonetheless fascinating structure-wise.

Check out the multiple layers of symmetry in this plant - 5 then 3 then...

For Gavin

An innocuous little box of screws, complete with manufacturers label:



So imagine my surprise and delight at discovering this inside:

That's Pakistani Reuse & Recycle at its finest...